Just FYI, if you hadn’t seen already, lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of the month.
(I’m just reminding people this so they don’t think the server just stopped working and get annoyed.)
Ie. You’ll be able to continue interacting with lemmy by making an account on a new server. :)
No, it was for trade with Asia
China didn’t need to find an alternative path to China
Lack of relationship, Europe and Asia had over a thousand years of history together before Europe tried to sail to them
Europe’s geography also meant sailing was important for war. Rome and Greece fighting over the Mediterranean, later Spain/France and Britain to even have a war. Africa and the Americas were more land based
Not In My Back Yard
It refers to people generally supportive of things, but not where they live.
Typical topics are energy/transport infrastructure or housing for refugees/homeless people.
This is funny, but would be more accurate if it said “MAGA Christians” instead of “White Christians”.
I’m an atheist and most of the Christians I know are pretty accepting. It’s almost as if they respect the teachings of Jesus and aspire to be more like him, unlike all too many MAGA Christians.
A lot of this is rooted in the media and politics of the community. I’ve watched older peers fall down the FOX News rabbit hole, becoming increasingly paranoid and hostile towards practically everyone outside the conservative base.
Churches that see Republican politics as a way of raising money will happily play along.
Missionary trips are often glorified vacations. “Voluntourism.”
High school/college kids come over, build a school and then bounce. It would be better if that money was spent hiring local people to build that school. It relies on this racist thinking that somehow those poor Black or South American or whatever people are too stupid to know how to build things/survive, and they need some random white kids to come in and safe the day.
It’s for show, it’s to make the “missionaries” feel good about themselves and get some nice profile pictures instead of actually doing anything.
There are cases of “hospitals” being started by random people with no medical training - one I’m thinking of killed lots of babies. Somehow a random unqualified white person is just better and smarter, that they can fix all the problems.
It’s such a fucking farce. The real problems of the global south are that the centuries of exploitation and colonialism destroyed those countries economies and ways of living. The pseudo charity does nothing but exist as colonialism lite.
(I am excluding the rare groups of actually qualified people. I’ve talked to nurses and such who have done good work in places like Haiti. But they also did the same kind of work here - the kind of people I met assembling fentanyl test kits.)